The Character of Style

17 Thursday Jun 2010

Posted by sitanshi talati-parikh in Fashion & Style, Publication: Verve Magazine

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Confessions Of A Shopaholic, Fashion, Gossip Girl, Sex And The City, Style, Trend, vervemagazine

Verve Magazine, Nerve, Fashion, May 2010

So haute couture is escapist fare for the masses and a note on what not to buy (since it’s too popular) for the fashionistas. Books, movies and TV serials get rank popularity because of the sequins and stilettos touted by their characters

A little discussion about the haute couture ways of popular women’s fiction led to the realisation that fashion is actually a real-life character, if not a protagonist, playing a very integral role in the lives of the others. So is the stylish drama about Manhattan’s scandalous elite, Gossip Girl, about Serena van der Woodsen and Blair Waldorf or is it about the clothes? Can you take in Serena and Blair’s striking good looks when you are busy gaping at the beautiful clothes they wear? Chuck Bass’ three-piece suits, bow ties and mirror-polish shoes are all telling you more than the actual person himself. Relationship make-ups comprise of receiving fabulous clothes in lovely big boxes. It’s not so much make-up sex as make-up sexy. Not surprisingly the fabulous ‘fashion show’ spawns off a whole bunch of shorts: Gossip Girl Couture, Gossip Girl Revealed, Gossip Girl: Faces Behind The Design, Stylish Confessions: The Fashions of Gossip Girl.

In much the same way that Sex and the City set the trend for Manolo Blahniks and Jimmy Choos to be the point of most conversation, the icing on the foot was when in SATC: The Movie, Mr. Big goes down on one knee with no ring, but a brand new Manolo in hand, and proposes. Carrie accepts, of course, and with evident pleasure slides her slender foot into the proffered Blahnik.

In Confessions of a Shopaholic, Rebecca Bloomwood is obsessed with the art of fashionable and pocket-burning shopping and to be honest, she truly falls in love with Luke Brandon when she discovers that he ‘speaks Prada’ even if adorably reluctantly. Not to forget that the pleated green scarf that started the whole relationship (and led to her being the famously anonymous ‘The Girl With The Green Scarf’) was auctioned off by credit-squashed Rebecca and salvaged by Luke and returned to her as a peace offering – a soft silky foundation to a long-lasting relationship. I mean can you love a man that doesn’t understand fashion and your love for it? Is it worth being in such a relationship that doesn’t include material indulgences of the best kind?

So, you discover that fashion now exists as a very necessary element in movies, books and TV shows. It’s not like it’s a new thing – the age of the Victorians and Romantics had their own characteristic dress elements: the cravat, the embroidered handkerchief twirled nervously, the beautiful hats entwined with ribbons, the gowns and the pearls. In fact the women, kept themselves entertained with notes, embellishments and comparisons on elements of clothes and accessories. The fact that fashion and more particularly brand names have now become hugely significant elements and often undeniably important to the viewing audience leads you to wonder what’s next? Movies are evaluated with the yardstick of their style-worthiness – people sat through SATC: The Movie (despite it being a weak cousin of the TV show) and loved it because of its high fashion elements; people ooohed and aaahed over the cinematic disaster Kambakkht Ishq because of the clothes, shoes and bags splashed across the screen. You often forget the movies, but you can’t escape the gorgeous fashion in them. It’s ominous, it’s morally unsound and deeply unsettling, but you can’t change the fact that the peep-toe stiletto, the bejewelled clutch and the silk scarf are as important (romantically) to a story as the people themselves. Sometimes even more so.

Mindless in the Desert: SATC-2 is actually just a spoof of itself!

15 Tuesday Jun 2010

Posted by sitanshi talati-parikh in Musings

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Hollywood, movies, Reviews, Sex And The City, Thoughts

How is it possible that Hollywood cannot see how stupid it makes Americans look when it creates movies like Sex and the City-2? I mean you start out with four relatively intelligent, well-read and well-travelled (we hope) women: a writer, a lawyer, a PR person and an art curator. How can these women who’ve spent years in their respective professions behave like such complete imbeciles? Well actually, Miranda and Charlotte do behave themselves, but the queen bees of the foursome, Carrie and Samantha act like absolute idiots.

I get that Samantha is Samantha – deliciously irreverent when it comes to sex and society. But I also get that while she flirts outrageously, and takes home a lot of goody bags, she generally doesn’t act like a moron in her home city. It seems that lack of hormones and hot flashes makes her go a little insane. She flagrantly flaunts social codes (which are a religious and legal issue in the middle east), while being the business guest of the sheikh who has kindly flown her friends and her first class in complete luxury to his home country, so that she can think about representing him in a PR capacity. It appears that Samantha could do with some PR of her own – and some re-training in the way to behave in public; not like a hormonal teenager on heat. And you can argue that that’s just Samantha – but is it? Did she become a top PR executive by showing hordes of conservative men her middle finger, breasts and her latest lay’s boner? I’m not really sure. It just seems that she’s finally becoming senile. Where even her Samantha-ness is no longer acceptable.

Do Americans really know so little of other cultures and behave this silly when they travel? What they do in New York is not really acceptable in Abu Dhabi! And flaunting social norms is not funny, it’s just stupid. Why does Hollywood not understand that when they make movies like this, they are not ridiculing the closed cultures of the world while heralding the joys of the librated ones, they are only proving that Americans can be really socially inept, culturally dumb and truly lacking in common sense, basic decency and courtesy and in any amount of general knowledge? And Americans are not really like this – the ones I’ve met are genuinely interested in other cultures and politely respectful of them. So who are these Americans that Michael Patrick King is idolising on big screen? What happened to the girls who regaled us with their smart repartees, chic appearance and layered conversations? The girls who may have used the metaphor of sex, but were making important observations about society, life, men and people. These are not the women we see now – the women now are haggard, bitchy, unable to learn from their lives’ many lessons and choose to regularly regress to inept teenage-world.

Miranda and Charlotte’s troubles are actually real and funny – they deserved more room to mature and grow, but instead the story got sucked into the vortex of Carrie’s stupidity and Samantha’s ridiculous faux pas. Carrie is just being plain ridiculous – she is tired of the relationship in its current form, she takes time off from their house, but when Big tries to intervene and asks for some time off too, she freaks out and goes and makes out with an ex-boyfriend. I mean really? Do these girls never grow up? What Carrie did when she was 20 and 30 is not really still acceptable at 45+! Does she never learn from her mistakes? Or is the writer so unimaginative that he can’t move or think beyond the usual troubles of the 4 girls? Where is the Carrie who only believed in the love of her life, and went through men trying to find happiness but unable to do so, because she truly loved another? Her affair with Big (when she was dating Aidan) was allowed, because he was the man she loved. Why would she cheat on the man she loves with Aidan? Just because he was too tired to go out to party with her after a long day at work and bought her a plasma TV instead of jewellery? Is she really that shallow?

And the clothes! The styling! What an eyesore! What the show had been known for, renowned for, were the supremely stylish clothes and looks. What have they done here? They’ve taken the brightest, gaudiest fabrics possible, stuck on extremely shiny, often pointy things, added the most garish of accessories that made them look like Christmas trees at best, and called them clothes. I can possibly accept that 4 of the 750 clothes actually looked reasonable, and the only good thing to come out of this is that Miranda got a makeover. The plain Jane of the series and the tubby-mommy of the first movie looked the best of the lot here. Carrie should have thought about mummifying her look from the series and staying cryogenically frozen. She has not aged well, and well, botox doesn’t work for everyone.

The movie would have truly worked as a spoof of the show and the series – outlandish clothes, haggard-looking women, absolutely no story, weak dialogues, stupid characters, social faux pas galore, trivialisation of social rules and a caricature of American intelligence (or the lack of).

I thought the first movie did injustice to the supremely brilliant shows, but in retrospect that movie was Oscar-material compared to this hunk of junk that fans of the show were forced to sit through for 146 minutes! Maybe King needs to think about handing the writing over to Darren Star – who put together 94 episodes of the show that won 8 golden globes. This movie, I’d be happy if it won a Razzie. Two funny lines and four decent outfits do not a movie make. I may just have to burn the box set of the Sex and the City after the incredibly bad taste this movie left in my mind and soul, ruining the iconic characters forever. I hope King gets the message and lets everything and everybody rest in peace, without a third piece of torture barraging our mind and the cities.

TV’s Dressing Down

18 Wednesday Nov 2009

Posted by sitanshi talati-parikh in Art, Literature & Culture, Features & Trends, Publication: Verve Magazine

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Fashion, Friends, Gossip Girl, Sex And The City, vervemagazine

Published: Verve Magazine, Nerve, October 2009

Looking at cult American television styling for inspiration may not be such a bad idea for the Indian boob tube, suggests Sitanshi Talati-Parikh

It was in 1998 that a deep sense of style began to permeate American television, with the advent of hit TV show Sex and the City. While the women were sharp, well put together and style conscious, the show only became the crucible of fashion a couple of seasons down, as it became more firmly established and daring. Not surprisingly, the show won an Emmy award for Costumes, and last year, designer Patricia Field launched a 60-piece Marks and Spencer clothes line modelled on the show’s styling.

And in that very fact lies the secret of the show’s successful outfitting: it brought about the genuine mix of high street and high-end designer fashion and made it accessible; also pointing out that the protagonists are not afraid to poke around musty vintage shops. Not just in the fact that Carrie is brave enough to wear her wardrobe experiments with élan, but also the fact that her concoctions are acceptable because of her supreme confidence. Think of the time she wore a Chanel top backwards with a handkerchief, or embellished her outfits with exaggerated accessories (corsages). Not to miss her unabashedly running through the streets of Manhattan in bright hot pants and stilettos.

One would assume all shows set in Manhattan would immediately be style and brand conscious – but that was not the case with Friends, where the styling was often atrocious (which did nothing to reduce its fan following). Gossip Girls may never achieve cult status like that of Sex and the City, but for both men and women, the show promises a feast for style-conscious eyes.

So what’s wrong with urban Indian television? Is it the fact that there are no shows set in trendy metros? Are we to remain relegated to putting up with the antiquated styling and oppressive jewellery of soap operas on the one hand and jeans and trashy urban outfits of reality shows on the other? Brinda Shah, styling consultant for television channels like Zoom explains, “We have a lot of restrictions in terms of clothes. Not just with the censor board which is difficult to say the least, but also the fact that Indian women cannot carry styles like high-cut backs. While celebs and VJs can experiment, regular people and TV actors are not as easy to work with.

The receptiveness of the audience needs to be considered – and really, it’s all about attitude.”

Undoubtedly, top TRP-endorsed Indian serials manage to put together a dazzling array of traditional finery – to the extent that it creates aspirational dressing for the audience, particularly when occasions demand such opulence. In that lies the strength and weakness of the fashion quotient that exists on television: it remains more traditional costuming where the women practically ‘sleep in their jadau’, rather than moving up the design ladder to becoming cutting-edge styling that has design houses taking notice. With top designers upping the ante in the Indian film industry (where Karisma Kapoor’s puff-sleeved frilly dresses changed into Kareena Kapoor’s chic minidresses) hopefully it is just a matter of time before they decide to foray into televsion – an untapped medium of huge impact.